Becoming-idiot: the other aesthetics in Duchamp, Warhol and other contemporary artists.

Abstract

This paper takes the idea of the “Idiot” (that has been previously studied by writers and thinkers such as Nietzsche, Faulkner, Flaubert, Bergson and Dostoievski) in order to suggest an alternative interpretation of the work of a number of contemporary artists. Taking the trilogy Spheres (developed by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk) as a starting point, the paper aims to define the figure of the idiot as a double placental immunized, inherent self-heating, also as a nobject that no longer holds an important message. On the contrary, it regulates psycho-themically our pluralistic societies at the most. The paper also addresses how artists like Duchamp, Warhol, Morris, Oldenburg, Abramovic and Carneiro focused on the idiotic. It also suggests how the hegemonic rational thought of the Enlightenment has sometimes been replaced by post-metaphysical transits on the idiotic, and therefore it has been configured in many different ways in spaces outside the modern subjectivity.